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You Won Cannes kicks off their annual end of year coverage to send off 2015 and usher in a new year of exciting content. Thank you to all of our readers for the support we’ve received in 2015, and have a happy new year! Visit the site throughout the week for more top 10 lists like this one from the YWC staff!

Oh me, oh my! It’s been a long time since ol’ Amos has been allowed to write for this otherwise dead website, having promised the editors I wouldn’t even touch my computer keys with my hands until they made a new STAR WARS movie. And now with the new STAR WARS bringing in all the money that could be going to making cinema great again, I can finally recap why 2015 has been the best year in cinema culture period. So unless you’re my ex-wife, sit back, knock back a half-dozen cold ones and get to gettin’, brah…

Own It On Blu-ray November 4!

If it wasn’t obvious before it’s pretty damn obvious now Greed is the primary sin slowly killing our society. As sins go, it’s an awful one too because it destroys any morality you may have had and any prejudices you might carry, thus making sure you think of nothing else but it. Greed has even found it’s way into the fantasy world of Middle Earth. Barring any “special rings” among the various beings that inhabit the realm, it appears Dwarves are more susceptible than most to its corruption. They used to live in this great mountain called, Erebor (aka The Lonely Mountain), where they forged huge amounts of gold.

After Groundhog Day (1993) came out I was a little surprised that there weren’t more films made exploiting that particular time travel anomaly Bill Murray suffered from in that film. The only other movie I can recall that had a similar plot was 12:01 (1993), which came out the same year. Here we are in 2014 and there are two new movies I know of now using this concept, the soon to be released sex comedy, Premature (2014), where a kid ends up re-living the embarrassing day he lost his virginity over and over, and the movie I’m about to talk in depth about, the Tom Cruise/Emily Blunt sci-fi actioner, Edge Of Tomorrow, so it looks like everything about being trapped in a time loop is new again.

It only takes one weak link to break a chain, and when The Counselor debuted in theaters in November, a once highly buzzed awards contender was reduced to entertainment rag cannon fodder rather unjustly thanks to the weak link of Cameron Diaz’s misguided performance in the film. Critics were divided, audiences were discouraged, and haters were ravenous — but to this author, much of the criticism is quite confusing in their points. If critics were to consider the tone of the film off-kilter, why not apply the same criticism to award-worthy oddities like Nebraska? If the film’s content was truly the issue, then why did audiences embrace downers such as Prisoners or Blue Jasmine?

Of course, the predictable pool of Oscar nominations is surely attributed to that of safety and necessity. While out-of-the-box candidates such as Gravity and Her will receive obligatory nominations, they’ll never be truly embraced by the Academy, allowing instead for the routine mix of charming character pieces, heart-wrenching melodramas, and zeitgeist-penetrating biopics to scoop up nominations all around. Meanwhile, as the horror genre is continually ignored for their incredible work in SFX, the Academy can sleep soundly knowing that legitimately unique cinema will not be given the satisfaction of critical embrace, at least not during its initial release.

Thanksgiving is upon us and with that come all of the glitz and glamour of turkeys and buckle hats. And it’s everywhere! You can’t escape Thanksgiving. It’s forced upon us so early that people quickly grow sick and tired of this and don’t want any of it. So how is Hollywood to capitalize on this American holiday event? Well, they gave it a shot in the most half-assed way possible: by remaking the Robert Downey Jr./Zach Galafinakis comedy classic Due Date with Steve Martin, a guy who plays the banjo, and John Candy, the guy who was the security guard in that Griswolds movie. It’s a pretty sorry cast, I’m afraid to say. It’s even sort of flabbergasting considering John Candy’s been dead since 1994. If it wasn’t for the appearance of MEGA STAR Kevin Bacon, I’d say most of their budget went to special effects to bring Mr. Candy back to life.

Our benevolent editor-lord won’t stop irritating me about writing something about Halloween for her quaint little website. Since I’m the master of having a good time, I offered to put together a list of suggestions for what you should be doing on the best night of the year, Halloween. If you don’t take any of my suggestions, you are a fool.

Okay, stupid, picture this. You’re at the movies, right? You’re with your significant other or alone or whatever. You sit down, and after twenty midnights of making jokes about casual dads and NYPD cops who kill homeless veterans to get their dicks hard, the lights go down. The completely fucking awesome DCP system starts up and like that, it’s the best time of the day: it’s trailer time.

So you’re sitting there, right? As you shovel whatever fucking shit into your mouth, the first preview starts off, and goes exactly like this…

As a kid, I took being a pussy to extraordinary heights. Being scared was the only thing I was good at. Well, no, that’s not true. I was good at watching TV. And when everything scares you, being a pussy was a given in my TV watching. Before the age of remotes, I would sit right in front of the screen, always at the ready to bail on the channel when something spooky popped up. Considering that everything scared me, an outsider might’ve observed that my rapid channel changing might be attributed to a case of ADD or that I was just a child of the ’90s. I wasn’t seeking thrills, I was conflicted. Every day, I would force myself to participate in my favorite and least favorite activity at the same time. Being 3 – 10 years old, it was a little confusing. Here’s a short list of the things I was afraid of…

I want to give you a heads-up before I really get into this: my tale is going to end where most things will this October. I’m tired of it, you’re tired of it. Zombies.

I grew up in the middle of nowhere. To some people, that means a few miles from town. I grew up FIFTEEN miles away from a town that had a population of about 1,200 in North Dakota. (Remember Fargo? Think that, only less wood-chippery, and way shittier.) This was in the mid-80’s and no company was running cable that damn far out of town. That meant in order to watch anything, you had to rely on old school TV reception. And when you loathe PBS, NBC is always 50% static, and you’re just plain sick of CBS, you head to the video store!

If I were to walk up to you tomorrow, and give you a disc that just said, ‘Movie’, on it, would you watch it? Would you? Even out of some sick, Richard Matheson-esque fucking desire to satiate your curiosity? And what if the movie was really good? Like Event Horizon good? Who would you tell? How would you share it?

Today, a whole bunch of idiots who had secure jobs at Focus Features in New York are getting the hard boot into the gutter of Funemployment. They’ll be in good company, since Paramount is doing the same to a bunch of their people too. Hundreds of people, just suddenly without jobs, because instead of one of their movies making $500 million worldwide, it made $375 million.